


the ruinousness of our extravagance

by seinmit



Category: The Folly of the World - Jesse Bullington
Genre: Alt Text Available, Amputation, Body Horror, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Foul Language, Crueltide, Dead Eel: Do Not Eat, Embedded SFW Image, Ex Sex, Fucked by Eels, Gore, Horror, M/M, Mild Eye Trauma, Post-Canon, Snuff, Water Sex, hand trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 07:27:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21840493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seinmit/pseuds/seinmit
Summary: Jan and Sander used to fantasize about the moment when Jan would kill Sander, taking the last breath right from his lungs. Neither of them would've imagined it quite like this.
Relationships: Sander Himbrecht/Jan Tieselen
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	the ruinousness of our extravagance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kutsushita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kutsushita/gifts).



> Image is from [here](https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/58688#/summary), lightly edited by me. It's just to set a tone, it's no problem if you cannot see it for some reason. 
> 
> I really hope you like it, dear recip. I adore this canon so much and it was a pleasure to write it for you.
> 
>  _Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance._ \- Georges Bataille, _Erotism: Death and Sensuality._

  
_from "An essay towards a natural history of serpents..." by Charles Owen (1746)_.

It was some time before Sander could reliably keep a grip on consciousness. It kept slipping away as if he were fumbling to do up his belt with one hand, drunk off his head and fingers slippery with grease.

There were moments when he was almost normal, and he could eat and drink and ask after Jo. She always seemed grateful to see him, as if she was surprised he hadn’t sunk to the depths of the meer, right through the heavy wooden planks at the bottom of the boat. That faded fast, though, his constitution struggling to manage the heat radiating from the stump that had once been his hand. He sweated right through his already stinking clothes and felt everything he touched congeal to him. 

He was floating on fever as much as water, if not more. Jo was only vaguely with him, a companion who moved around the little boat with an assuredness he hadn’t seen in her for awhile—he remembered her swimming, the perfect grace of it. She wasn’t like that on land—she moved with jerky, angry purpose, like he moved, like her small body could bowl people over with sheer force of will. 

He would awaken with his eyes closed, sleep with them open, speak both with sense and without. His words reached beyond his own boundaries and he spoke truth to Jo, things he couldn’t have known consciously. In the half-life of delirium, he felt the boundaries of himself disintegrate and his stuff leak out into the surrounding morass. His veins pumped blood into the air and sea, his mind used thoughts that didn’t belong to him. 

He told Jo about the Belgians and for the first time understood their language. He watched a memory of himself drowning in mud, underneath writhing eels and grasping hands, from the outside. He saw himself die and felt an alien burst of fondness in his breast. 

"Oh, Sander," he muttered through cracked lips. "You mad bastard."

A cool rag, stinking of the meer-water, washed his face. Jo was trying to be gentle, but it didn’t come natural and his whole skull jerked underneath her ministration.

"Time comes, you chose to be a bitch," he told her. He fell asleep again, true and proper sleep—or at least close enough that he couldn’t remember anything else.

* * *

A jerk. The whole boat heaved and shuddered. It rattled something loose in Sander’s skull, and his brain tumbled over to pound against bone. 

"Wha—" he snorted, jerking upright, moaning as the pain crested. 

Jo was clutching the side of the boat. She craned her body over as if to look for what was underneath them, and then pushed herself so quickly back from the edge she landed on her arse. 

She looked at Sander, eyes wide and strained. 

"Something—"

Another bump, and sloshing noises. Water was seeping in, the planks parting under the strain of whatever it was. He felt his breath rise into the bottom of his throat, choking him. He sat very still, as if that would mean the darkness underneath them wasn’t swarming. 

The mist around them was as heavy as smoke, enough that Sander couldn't see four feet into it. He stopped looking, worried what he’d see out there as much as he was concerned about the deep. Last they’d been on a journey like this, he’d seen countless indications of what had been drowned underneath the water. There had been the smoky shapes of houses, with roofs gone to rot, and small noises of wildlife. The flood had drowned the people, but fish and birds had flourished on their corpses. 

Now, it was still. Even after the sharp impact of whatever-it-was, they were scarcely leaving ripples of wake in the glass-like surface of the water. The light was scattered so much he wouldn’t have been able to tell where the sun was and the mist made air indistinguishable from water. There was light, though. He held on to that thought—the Belgian cunts had lived in darkness. 

"Maybe we're foundering on land," he said in a hoarse voice. "How long have we been out here?" 

"Too long," Jo said. She opened her mouth as if she had more to say, but closed it. She looked away from him, back out into the water. "I’m going to row," she said. 

She unlatched the oars and dipped them into the black water. Sander had the thought to help, but when he reached out to take them from her, the brown-stained bandage on his wrist stump reminded him what had happened. 

They didn’t speak as the oars dipped in and out of the water, making a quiet splashing noise scarcely louder than their breathing. 

Then a choked sound from Jo and the cracking sound of wood breaking. One oar was yanked out of her hand with enough force to break the oar lock straight off the dinghy. 

"Maybe you caught it on the roof of a house," Sander said. "Maybe you caught it in some thrice-damned reeds. Damn you, girl, why can’t you keep hold of anything?" 

Jo ignored him and scrambled for the crossbow. Her fingers slipped as she tightened the string, tried to prime it to fire. 

Another impact and the wood groaned from it. The whole bottom of the boat surged up, something enormous underneath them trying to rise. A sharp crack cut through the eerie, dampened hush and the boat fell to pieces around him. 

The water was a shock, though it wasn't cold. It was the temperature of cooling spit and the same sort of viscosity. He felt like he was caught in it more than swimming through it. He was dumb and blind with terror, and clumsy—he kept reaching out to cup water with his missing hand, but the stump passed through without catching on anything. It was a swooping, nauseating feeling, but he could not seem to keep the hand clutched to his breast. 

He swam, not thinking of Jo, not thinking of the supplies that she'd gathered while rescuing him, just knowing that something was coming for him and he wasn’t supposed to die like this. 

The only thing he could hear was his own breath in his ears and the splashing of water, but he knew that fish moved quiet. The movement of the water about his body nearly sent him spiraling down into the dark that lived in the base of his skull and would yank him around as sure as a bit in his teeth. 

"Sander!" A shout, and then the sound of water draining off of a body. He swam toward where he thought Jo was and ended up slamming his stump into a wall before he noticed it. The pain filled his mouth with the taste of bile. 

The stone scraped his skin and he clung to it with his remaining hand, digging his fingernails into crumbling mortar as he tried to gain hold of his stomach and stop his reeling. 

He tried to pull himself up the wall, but his thrice-damned body was too fat from wealth and his muscles were weak. He felt the strain of trying with no success, his body entirely inadequate to what he was asking it to do. 

Jo’s strong hands grabbed onto his wet and filthy shirt, giving him enough of a boost that he could pull himself, gasping like a landed fish, onto a filthy patch of stone. 

He managed to sit, grit smeared across his face and crumbling into his mouth. He spat and tried to put all his fucking hate into it, hoping it would poison the earth itself. The whole world stank of mold and mildew, there was no escape, and Sander needed to drown the feeling of decline with the power of his hate. 

Jo was gasping next to him, her whole body heaving. She was breathing harder than made sense, even with their swim. 

"It get you, girl?" Sander demanded. "You hurt?" 

"It’s here," she said. "We're _here._ "

He cast her a hairy eye. It wouldn't do for her to go mad as well, there needed to be one of them who could be relied upon to keep their head. Supposed it ran in the family, though, and a zing of humor didn’t cut through the hate and fear that filled him but gave it savor. 

"Sander," she snarled. "You cheeseheaded moron, don't you recognize this place?" 

There was no gap between that reminder and the realization. His stomach plummeted and he gagged. He clamped his hand over his mouth, to keep the vomit in and the air out, the air hovering over the home where the ring had been found and Jan had died—the first time, at least. They were perched on the very same crypt where Jan and Jo had once shared a loaf of bread while Sander sullenly ignored the vastness of nothing around them. The mist seemed to thin just enough to increase the horror of his observation. 

The church spire, poking from the surface of the water. Nothing underneath was visible, as if the water had sliced a building clean in two. The muck and reeds around them. They didn’t move—the air was still. They were in the graveyard of the Tieselans, where Jan’s ancestors had been buried and his father died and he himself had fallen, dead on this patch of hell. Sander and Jo were Tieselans now, too. 

Jo was covered in mud, soaking wet. She was shivering, though the air was warm enough, humid like the inside of a cold-blooded fish’s mouth. Sander had a strange urge to offer her comfort and he figured it was probably because he felt like he needed it himself. With effort, he pulled himself away from looking at her—it felt a little like tugging off a scab, his flesh wanting to hang on. 

He studied the water. He thought maybe it was higher than it had been. It was fucking unfair, that years went by and the water just got higher. There was no one left to drown.

* * *

Jo missed the sea with an intensity that she didn't expect. This water smelled like dirt and rot. It was still and quiet. The ocean was never quiet and it smelled sharp and briny, electric. The ocean smelled like the blade of a sword and this lake was the grave the dead were buried in. 

She looked down at her hands, stained the wrong color purple, with perfect thick lines of black under each of her now-ragged fingernails. They didn’t much look like the hands of the woman she’d been, for a little while. 

Maybe she should never have left the purple. 

Her upper lip curled at even the thought of her shitbird brothers and her fucking cunt of a father, hard work and not enough food and her skin scoured by salt. She was alive and even though she had lost the supplies she’d brought with her from Dordrecht, she could feel the weight of a purse on her hip, so she had that. 

They’d swim or something, fuck. It had been awhile since she'd done that much swimming. 

"D’you see that?" Sander’s voice was flat, preternaturally calm. 

She looked at him. His hair was starting to shake off the water, getting back up into the wild mess it usually was. His mouth was slack, but he drew it back up, tucked it in. She could see him press his lips together. 

"What do you see, Sander?" she asked. 

He jerked his chin out to the water, but kept his mouth closed. She followed the gesture and let her eyes fall on the meer—

There was a light. 

It was darker than it had been, night falling. The sun was invisible past the layers of mist, so who could neuking say. But it was dark now and even if it hadn’t been, the light that she saw was from deep under the water. 

"Yeah," she said. "I see it." 

"What is it?" he asked. 

Her mouth was dry. Gooseflesh rose up on every bit of her skin. She didn't want to look, but the initial glance had been enough to know what it was. Maybe her eyes were better than Sander’s or maybe it was because she’d been in that manor, she’d swum through one of those windows in that grand brick wall. She had worked very hard not to remember anything of that time, but the distinguishing feature was darkness. 

The house was glowing, now. Almost cheerfully. Like a grand old party the Graaf was throwing, every candle and lamp lit up in order to show off his wealth just as much as give off light. It was getting stronger under their eyes. 

"The house, innit?" Sander said. "That fucking house, that place full of plaugebitches and cunts. The fucking house, fuck them, I wish it had fucking burned down before the waters fucking came—"

He was working himself up. Jo couldn't look away from the glow in order to check, but she knew that spittle was starting to gather on his lips, frothing. 

"Fuck them, fuck every Graaf motherfucker that ever pissed in a pot and thought they were better than us," he said. 

She let it wash over her and kept looking at the glow. She thought, very distinctly, that she needed to leave. She didn’t belong here. 

Sander stood up with enough violent force that he toppled himself over into the water with a loud splash and a yell. 

She jumped and looked at him, finally. He flailed and coughed as he tried to get his bearings. 

"Fuck," he howled at the top of his lungs. It was swallowed up by the nothing around him, as muffled as if he’d been screaming into velvet instead of open air. "Fuck _this_."

His nostrils flared and he snorted some mucky water out of his nose. 

And then he was quiet, clinging on to the crumbling stone wall of the crypt. 

"I ever tell you about the well, girlie?" he said, shockingly calm after the violent rage of seconds before. She didn’t respond, but he kept talking. 

"My da didn’t like my taste for cock or my sticky fingers with his things and whenever he caught me with cock or coin that weren’t my own, he’d toss me right in the well and cover it up," he said. 

"Seems unfair to make everyone's water taste of your ass," she said, weakly. 

He smiled at her, outright smiled. The skin around his eyes wrinkled and his eyes looked clearer than they had since Dordt. 

"Shut up, cuntbitch," he said. It was rough in the way that passed for him as fond. "I’m tryin’ say something, have some fucking decency."

"Surely my mad pa is to blame for my lack of manners," she said. 

He smiled again and Jolanda had the sudden surety that he was going to do something profoundly stupid. 

"Fuck this," he said, suddenly. "Jan was the one for cunting speeches, and look how that ball-washer turned out." 

And then he started to swim toward the light and the top of the manor. He swam like a neuking three-legged cat, which she guessed wasn’t all wrong. Her heart was pounding as she watched him splash and curse and half-swim, half-wade his way toward the eerie amber light. 

'"Sander, what are you doing?" she whispered. It wasn't even loud enough to be heard over the splashing and grunting. 

He reached the roof of the manor. He stood there for a moment, looking down. She could see the hole they’d made. The light was leaking through stronger, there, and she could see the silhouette of the soggy wood sinking down into the deep. She remembered the way her toes had dug into the wood like it was cheese. 

"You made out like this was colder, Jo," he said. "All that shivering and chattering, you dramatic little bitch. It’s as warm as if I just pissed myself." 

"You’d know," she said. 

He looked back at her, bared his teeth in something like a smile. He jumped in.

* * *

Sander held his breath. The water was a heavy weight pressing down on each inch of his skin, from every direction. He’d done a lot of thinking about getting smothered in his time, mostly when he was prone and his cockstand the only thing lively about him. There wasn’t enough rope 'round here, but at least the water had the warmth of a body holding him down. 

The light cast strange shadows, not like any he’d seen before. It was clearly coming from another room, deeper in the building and when it entered the room he was in, it cast flickering shadows. The water distorted the already strange shapes, making the world hazy and strange. Silt drifted around him, swirling and almost glittering in the light. 

It was pretty, almost. Sander admired it, the fresh water not stinging his eyes. His lungs were screaming, pounding at the inside of his chest like he was trapped in there. It was easy to keep holding his breath, though—which was odd. When he was a kid, he remembered getting so frustrated, hand around his own cock and the other one around his throat. He’d never had the self-control to keep the air out of his own lungs, never able to make himself pass out with just his own power. Even when he enlisted tools—rope and a low branch, one time—his unruly body would start to struggle to free himself the moment his vision darkened, even if he was about to shoot. 

Guess he’d learned something, since then, because he didn’t feel any urgency about not being able to breathe. He felt familiar twinges in his gut, the sparkling feeling that came when he did this sort of thing. If only there was rope, he thought. That’d be the ticket. 

He kept moving and the world swam with him, distorting around him. He had to do this, he knew that. He’d been running from them too long. They’d always been chasing him and they’d always be behind him. He’d been driven on by rage and fear, wild-eyed like a ram with a burr on its balls. He was fucking done, that was it, that was final. This was supremely goddamn creepy, but he wasn’t any kind of coward, not anymore. He wasn’t any kind of Graaf, either, but something about spending so long rich and respected had given him the sense that maybe he could stand to grow a little spine. 

He yanked a slat of wood off the closed door. There was already a hole there, from where Jo had passed, but Sander was bigger than her. It was like ripping paper. 

He was getting closer to the source of the light. It was still only hitting him sideways, from another room, but it was growing bright. His heart jumped up, a fierce rabbit pace, and his vision started to spark and fade, simultaneously. He’d been holding his breath too long, he thought. He was going to drown. 

He needed to see the source of the light. He wanted to see the fucking _candle_. He dragged himself with his hand on the walls, scrambling. He was tearing the house apart with his efforts, not every hand-hold able to keep his weight. 

Finally, he got to the dining room. He knew it’d be there, somehow. He’d never been to Jan’s da’s place, though they’d been running together for years. But nonetheless, he knew, like something in the base of his skull had reached out ahead of him and given him warning. 

There Jan was, in the water. He was holding Sander’s hand in his own—not in a lover’s way or anything like that, but like a candle, hooked around the wrist and letting each of five fingers reach for the sky. They were strangely twisted, as if he’d been reaching for something right before he’d done it. Each finger had a flame emanating from it. The skin was shriveling up, starting at the tips of his fingers and folding in increasingly heavy wrinkles as it went down the palm, gathering around the wrist. It was like it was melted wax, dripping and pooling at the base. 

"You know, this is supposed to be the hand of a hanged man," Jan said, lightly. "That’s the version I heard, at least. Good thing you spend so much time hanging yourself, you filthy bastard, right?" 

Sander’s chest twisted in a new type of pain. But it wove itself together with his burning lungs, like a tree growing crooked around a fence. 

"Open your mouth, love," Jan said. "You know you can breathe. You’d’ve drowned already if you couldn’t, you know that?" 

If this’d be the thing that did it, it’d be fitting. Sander wouldn’t mind all that much. They used to tell each other tales of the different ways that Jan’d kill him, when it came time. Sander’d groan and howl and lose what little remained of his mind as Jan speared him on his cock and promised him that Jan’d make it slow, he’d use his hands on Sander’s neck while the rest of him was tied up. The last breath Sander took, he’d take from Jan’s lungs. 

He had more versions of the final murder than that, but this was the one he used to finish Sander off. Because he was a mad bastard, like everyone said, Sander felt his cock getting heavy between his legs. He made a point to adjust himself and Jan just looked fond, fuck. 

Sander took a deep breath and filled his lungs with the water of the meer. It didn’t hurt. It had the same sort of sweetness that the first breath of air usually did, the same fizzy joy that he was alive, that nothing had got him yet. He gasped and gasped in liquid. It was warmer than air, maybe. Maybe heavier. He felt it seep into his lungs and his blood, his veins and flesh. He was gonna turn into something different. 

"Sander, you already were different," Jan said. He took a step forward, holding the candle of Sander’s hand out in front of him. "You’ve been my creature for years, now." 

"Years and years," Sander mumbled. "I’ve been your creature since I was seventeen." His voice thrumming in the water, all the movement of curreant making it throb and shift even in his own throat. 

"Different sort of creature now," Jan said. His voice was soft and he reached out with the hand not holding the candle, as if to embrace Sander—but he was still too far away, a good six feet. The hand stretched like taffy, like—his hand uncoiled into dark slender shape, a needle-tooeethed eel. It opened its mouth, laughing at him. It had horrible eyes, like coins stuck on its narrow head, and its skin had a strange dappled texture. 

He tried to back away, but the water held him up, forced him into place and then the eel was on him. It wrapped itself around his wrist and then most of it went further up his arm, keeping hold of his hand and sliding in a horrible rush against his skin. 

The strange equanimity that Sander had been drifting vanished, replaced with terror and fear. He started trying to yell, but suddenly the water became water again, choking him. He gagged and spit, vomit floating around him, discernible only in that it reflected light slightly different. 

Jan laughed. He looked delighted. He was closer, now, and what had looked like fine clothes was revealed to be just more fucking eels, surrounding him and moving. They flowed and writhed, giving him a shifting, uncertain quality.

"You made me shriek, when you killed me," Jan said. He was close enough to nose at Sander’s cheek. His skin was the same texture as the eels and Sander could feel the movement of the water, displaced by all the bodies. More eels were drifting from Jan and surrounding Sander, holding him down and pulling them together. "I’m going to do you the same favor, dear Sander. My true love, you know."

He’d said it before and every time it made Sander choke. His eyes burned and he squeezed them shut, he didn’t want to have to see that face laughing down at him, he’d already spent too much time dreaming—

Tiny teeth sunk into his eyelid and he snapped them open. Right around his eyes were a dozen little eels, the length of his pinkie and skinnier still. They fluttered like eyelashes, but they dug their way into his flesh with their teeth and dragged them until he was opened wide. 

"Your eyes always made you look young," Jan said. He had eased back enough that he could look Sander right in the face. "The big bear that’s the rest of you, muscle and fat and your wild hair. It’s quite the picture. But then your eyes—as sweet and harmless as the sheep your dad fucked to make you. You’re a soft little bitch, aren’t you? Gone softer still, with my ring on your finger." 

Some of the eels had forced themselves between his damp trousers and his skin. They went up his calves and thighs and nosed at his pouch. He shuddered and tried to jerk away—the way Jan tilted his head meant that he knew Sander just did it to relish the way he couldn’t move. 

Fuck, he couldn’t bear this and yet it was exactly right, it was where he was always going. His heart howled, fear and lust and something that probably was the love that’d always been there and something else that was the hate that’d grown since Jan had forced Sander to skewer the man he loved with less care than he’d taken killing mutton—  
And like the inevitability it was, he felt the prick of sharp eel teeth on his asshole before the thing nudged its way in. 

Jan grunted like he always did when his cock first breached Sander, a self-satisfied tone to it. That was enough to make Sander fully hard, rock his hips up into nothing but the undulations of fish. 

He tried to reach for Jan, whether to push him away or pull him close, but he only had the stump—the bandages unraveled into the water, drifted away, and then the badly burnt off end of it regressed, went back to how it was when he first cut it off. He didn’t remember it consciously, a black stain in his memory from drink and pain, but his eyes remembered this—the tendons and cords floated out from the end where his hand had been, like seaweed wavering in the current. They grew and thickened, gained flesh and width, mass and muscle, until they were eels coming from him and writhing, pulling his innards out by their knife-edged tails. 

His eels went around Jan, pulled him close, but they touched him with the tenderness of a lover. Sander is restrained, but Jan is being held. Jan’s perfect skin wasn’t being pricked and torn by thousands of tiny eel teeth. That was okay, Sander thought. Sander had killed Jan first. 

The thick intrusion in his gut felt somewhere between a cock and an eel, too long and thick to belong to any man, with a strange way it moved and twisted on its own within him—but it was blood hot and familiar that way. Sander grunted, hitching his hips back into it. He was greedy for what Jan would give him, this one last time. 

He was hard, dick leaking into the water. The movement around it felt like the worst fucking tease, like someone brushing the softest fingertips against his skin. He didn’t want soft. 

"Jan," he gritted out. 

"Need a hand, Sander?" Jan said. His teeth were startling white—they hadn’t been like that, before. The hand-of-glory was glowing right next to both their faces, but it put off no heat. Jan just flickered in front of him, the tendrils of the eels holding Sander’s eyes open waving between them. 

"Please, Jan," he said. 

Jan leaned in and bit his cheekbone, hard enough to make a little cloud of blood between them. Sander imagined him tearing out a bite, flesh and fat between is teeth—Sander’d done that to the priest, years back, but it would be different between the two of them 

"You forget that I hate you, Sander," Jan said against his skin. "You’re telling yourself that this isn’t like that—I can hear you, but it isn’t that. You killed me for that stupid slut. I’m killing you because I can. There’s no grand design, here. I just fucking hate you." 

Sander jerked as the thing inside him fucked up into him hard enough he rocked up onto his toes, only held in place by the countless other eels around his body. He tried to swallow his moans and he felt each mouthful of water go down his throat like whole walnuts, filling him up from the top, too. He believed Jan—he could feel the hate, it kept the deep water around them as warm as blood. There was no point to this other than the desire to rip Sander to pieces and Jan’d very likely do it on his eel-cock. 

But Sander curled his toes in his disgusting, sodden boots and felt his body swell up with white light and Jan forcing his way into his body. Thing was, Jan always had a plan—every bit of cruelty Sander’d ever seen him do was in the service of his own interest, grand or particular. And while _they_ had tormented him over the years, it was all conspiracies, all ways to get their tentacles in every bloody purse and pie. 

This—this was nothing other than pleasure and cruelty. Sander was going to die here, in Jan’s arms, for no fucking point at all other than the fact that Jan wanted to do it. The thought filled him with bliss; Jan’d never been so obvious about his love before. 

He came, his balls clenching up so hard that they hurt. The thing kept fucking him—sped up even faster, maybe. The eel around his wrist tightened, went hard and hot as beaten iron. It didn’t feel anything like a fish, not anymore. 

The pain of it sunk into his skin, burning him right down to the boat. He knew he’d smell his own flesh cooking, if he was able to smell this far from the sky. He recognized the feeling from when he’d taken fire to his own bleeding stump, tried to keep himself alive with the judicious application of even more fucking pain. 

Now, though, this would be the pain that would kill him. 

"Need a matched set," Jan said. The slender eels between their faces left complicated twisting shadows on his face, but they couldn’t hide the glitter in Jan’s eyes. 

Jan’s eels pulled and pulled and Sander screamed, sending desperate gurgling bubbles into the water. He felt the pressure of the tug all the way up to his armpit, but the eels were holding him steady, making it so that every pound of strength was focused on his wrist. 

With the sick feeling of strength giving way, Jan tore his hand right off his body. He felt the give like release, like the split second where the water at the bottom of the well held him up before he slipped into it, like his asshole giving way when Jan forced his cock inside. 

The water around them was flooded with red and he tasted mineral-blood underneath the rot fish that fouledthe water. 

His head started to hurt like Jan was fucking him through his eyeball instead, the same rocking-humping in his throbbing temples. He was slumping, pain and weakness rising up with the bile in his throat. It was getting there, he was getting close. 

Suddenly there was the scratch of hemp against his skin, pulling tight. He felt the burn of friction. Rope.

"I promised, didn’t I?" he heard, and that was it.

* * *

Jolanda watched the light glow underneath the water. She knew Sander wasn’t going to surface. She stayed until it blinked out, leaving her alone in the black ink of the night. She imagined him dining with the iridescent eels, the eels dining on him, and wondered if they’d come for her here or dangle her on the line a little more yet. 

_fin_.


End file.
